Rape Legalized

In the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, I found 17-year-old Saida who was on the run from her husband. Her father had died when she was little and her brothers had claimed her as their property. They sold her off, at the age of 9, to a 60-year-old man. "If he saw a shoe or a stick, anything – he would beat me with it," Saida said, "I had four miscarriages because of the beating and the stress". Then her husband took his child bride on the road to places where they were not known and sold her to other men, forcing her to have sex with them. Finally, Saida confided in a woman at a shrine in Mazar-i-Sharif, the police were alerted and Saida was taken to a women’s shelter.                                               

BBC News, 16 August 2009

Many young women have taken to streets of Afghanistan to protest against the new law passed by the Krzai government which restricts a woman’s right to leave her home and demands she submit to her husband’s sexual desires. Afghanistan is a lawless place – the government is not able to implement its own laws to keep women safe or to protect them from a resurgent Taliban.  However, some women are standing up to the extremists. but they are labeled as infidels or un-Islamic as they go against Islam, their nation, and their honor. the continuous effort of these men are to control the minds and thoughts of women and to subjugate them.

The politicisation of women’s rights is not unique to Afghanistan. However, it is especially acute, with women’s rights and women’s virtue forming the tipping point for escalated violent conflict – within personal relationships and across international borders – for decades. Ismail Khan led the first violent uprising against the Soviet Union in March 1979 in response to a Soviet-led decree granting all girls universal and free education. The 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan has been internationally justified under the rhetoric of freeing Afghan women from Taliban rule.

In this highly charged environment, women calling for change and equality – calling for their enshrined human rights – are increasingly targets of violence and intimidation. Death of the nation’s most prominent women’s activist Before Mrs. Achakzai and the assassination of the country’s most senior female police officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Malalai Kakar, and Safia Amajan, the head of Kandahar’s women’s affairs department shows the degree of lawlessness in the country. These deaths bear witness to a growing public acceptance of violence against women and do not bode well as an indicator of the status of women’s human rights in Afghanistan.

Violence replaces debate and dialogue, and silences a powerful majority of the country through fear. People who believe that human rights are not a Western imposition, but central to their understanding of Islam, and to their beliefs and cultures are suffocated to death.

The remaining few people who continue to bravely speak out in defense of human rights are crucial to the future of Afghanistan. Brave women and men willing to stand up must be supported and protected. Violence with impunity must not be allowed to continue, and the Afghan government and the international community must join in holding the nation accountable to this standard.

To Veil or Not to Veil

Egypt’s most famous university, Al-Azhar University, has banned female students from veiling their faces on its premises and affiliated educational establishments. However there has been demonstrations by women students in Cairo after a leading cleric backed moves to ban the niqab, a full women’s veils, in classrooms or dormitories. Surprised? So was I. Why are Muslim women opposed to de-veiling their existence? 

I always thought that Muslim women are coerced by their parents and society to remain in veil. Alas! I fail to realize that my beliefs are constructions of popular books like Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia (Jane Sasson). Personally, I’ve seen my classmates wearing a niqab, but they used to take it off in classrooms. But I never asked if they wore it out of compulsion for I presumed that they are.

This particular event is an eye opener. Women themselves want to wear the niqab, as they feel safe from prying eyes. It reminds me of the news an incident I read about in newspaper a year ago. A pro-niqab spam campaign that circulated by email last year:

A veil to protect or eyes will molest!

A translation from the Quran regarding the issue runs like this:

O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies.

Does this provide a clear explanation, or is it open to interpretation? I feel the latter applies.

According to the libertines of Egypt,  that niqab is not an Islamic religious requirement. It is a phenomenon that has started to spread from the Middle East and Taliban rule and has caught women’s fancy.

The explanation appears absolutely inadequate and simplistic. Are these libertines freeing women or do they feel women are ignorant nincompoops? The reason must be deeper ingrained in the belief structure of these women.

Feminist arguments against the veil is manifold. One, and the most well known, is the pop cultural feminist ideology which views veil as the sign of oppression of women by Islamic fundamentalists. A second group who are willing to hear to the reasons put forward by the women behind veils, however, are not willing to sanction it. They consider the veil to be a de-liberating factor of women in the patriarchal religion. However, many women consider it to be a liberating factor. According to these women a niqab is to:

give back women ultimate control of their own body. (Katherine Bullock, 180)

According to the belief of these women they are happy to be covered. To quote Naheed Mustafa, a 17 year old Canadian born Muslim  (who wrote an article My Body is My Own):

Women are not going to achieve equality with the right to bear their breasts in public, as some people would like to have you believe. That would only make us party to our own objectification. True equality will be had only when women don’t need to display themselves to get attention and won’t need to defend their decision to keep their bodies to themselves. 

So the question is to veil or not to veil? Who is correct and who is wrong? Frankly, isn’t it a matter of personal choice?